North-East Regional e-Science Centre

The North-East Regional e-Science Centre acted as a front door for e-Science in the area, offering expertise to university researchers and industry.

One of the Centre's key activities was to identify, fund and support high-quality projects with leading industrial and academic partners. Another important function was matchmaking for industrial and academic groups with common interests.

The Centre's activities covered a wide range of fields, but it had particular expertise in data-intensive e-Science.

The NEReSC was established in July 2001, funded by the EPSRC and DTI through the UK Core e-Science programme, to provide expertise in e-Science and to instigate and run a set of industrially focused projects. The aims of the centre were:

To become a centre of excellence in e-Science

To initiate and manage a £1m programme of industrially focused projects with matching industrial contributions

To act as a first point of contact for e-science in the region, for companies and university research groups

To develop specialist expertise in database-intensive computing on the Grid

To participate in a national Grid of computing/data resources and facilities

The Centre had a core technical team to assist e-Science projects and practitioners with:

Designing Grid-based systems

Education & Training

Support

Developing common middleware

Grid system installation, configuration & management

The Centre was part of the School of Computing Science, and was based in the Devonshire building, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Its regional remit included the whole of the North East, including Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Teesside and Northumberland and extended as far south and west as York, Leeds and Sheffield.

The Centre benefited from extensive contact with leading computing groups based at Newcastle, including the Parallelism, Distributed Systems, Dependability, and Theory Groups.